‘God save thee, ancient Mariner!
From the fiends, that plague thee thus!—
Why look’st thou so?’—With my cross-bow
I shot the ALBATROSS.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Probably the most significant victory to celebrate on Memorial Day is the defeat of fascism and the Nazis in Germany during World War II. According to the official tally, not counting unknown soldiers, 1,076,245 Americans were counted as casualties in the Second World War, more than any other war in our history.
It was clear what we were fighting for, or more accurately against, in that war. There is very little disagreement these days about the importance of the involvement in the United States in that war, although there was disagreement at the time of our intervention.
But in the fog of public opinion since then, many Americans seem to have forgotten what we were fighting in that war and seem willing to renegotiate the kind of America we want to have now and going forward.
What seems to get lost in any public debate about this is what happened in Spain while the rest of Europe fought to save some semblance of democracy. And it could be that the Spanish Civil War might be a more instructive bit of history to explore as the partisan divide continues to split America into factions.
The Spanish Civil War was fought in the years before WWII and is sometimes called a “dress rehearsal” for the Second World War. Reading about it now reveals all the different factions that were active at the time in a way that is hidden in the U.S. these days.
According to official accounts, the Spanish Civil War was fought from 1936 to 1939 between the Republicans and the Nationalists. But the Republicans and the Nationalists in Spain were not the same thing as Republicans and Nationalists in the U.S. today. In fact, the Trump MAGA Republicans here and now are the nationalists, the so-called white nationalists or Christian nationalists.
But back then, Republicans were more like mainstream, establishment Democrats in the U.S. today who were loyal to the left-leaning Popular Front government of the Second Spanish Republic. Competing to hold sway in that government were factions of socialists, communists, separatists, anarchists and others, some of which had opposed the government in the pre-war period but got involved basically to fight fascism and dictatorship.
The Nationalists were made up of an alliance of so-called Falangists — the fascists and Nazis in Spain in alliance with the Nazis in Germany and Italy — along with conservatives, traditionalists and those who wanted to bring back the monarchy.
General Francisco Franco was a strong man leader or “caudillo” who led the military junta to victory, and he ruled the country as a dictator until his death in November 1975. Is that really what Americans who support Trump want for this country?
Due to the international political climate at the time, the war had many facets and was variously viewed as class struggle, a religious struggle, a struggle between dictatorship and republican democracy, between revolution and counterrevolution, and between fascism and communism.
Many writers and artists got involved in the war, including Ernest Hemingway and Lillian Hellman, George Orwell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Salvador Dalí and Pablo Picasso.
Here in the U.S., these factions are not clear. Everybody just claims they are fighting for “democracy,” although it is not clear what some people mean by that.
The political and militia factions that got involved in trying to overthrow our democratically elected government on January 6, 2021, seemed to be fighting for an authoritarian government and participating in a coup to install Donald Trump as the first American dictator. But you can watch YouTube videos all day long every day with interviews of Trump supporters and not find a single participant who understands or admits that’s what they were doing. They claim they were fighting for some form of democracy, and many of them seem quite willing to say what they really want is a white, Christian country and government, even though the United States has never been that. We have been an inclusive melting pot since the very beginning.
There is no superior race here. In fact, we are the home of a great experiment in evolution and natural selection, where the mixing of races has in fact created a new race of Americans. No one wants to admit that, but it doesn’t matter. It is a fact of life here.
But for the foreseeable future, we are going to be fighting these factions that want to change the game, change the system, and turn this country into a fascist authoritarian regime like Spain was for much of the 20th century.
According to Matthew C. MacWilliams, a visiting research associate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the author of On Fascism: 12 Lessons from American History, one of the important lessons Americans learned from Donald Trump’s election in 2016 … is just how many of our fellow citizens are predisposed to authoritarianism.
“In high school civics we were taught that ‘American authoritarianism’ was an oxymoron. Authoritarianism was a relic of the past. America was a country founded on freedom, steeped in equality and justice, and uniquely immune to it,” he wrote. “We now know that this story is a national fairy tale.”
As he wrote in Politico nearly a year before Trump’s victory in 2016, the single factor that predicted whether a Republican primary voter supported Trump over his rivals was “an inclination to authoritarianism.” The article was based on a national survey taken nearly a year before the presidential election, and it was followed by stories and reports elsewhere on how Trump was stirring up a deep, if often dormant, authoritarian strain in our politics.
“American authoritarianism will flourish if Trump wins the presidency again — and it won’t magically vanish if he loses. Either way, it is critical to understand this strain in our politics, both how prevalent American authoritarianism really is, and what kinds of policies and changes American authoritarians will support when stirred up,” MacWilliams wrote.
Trump Is an Authoritarian. So Are Millions of Americans
The results of four national panel surveys found that approximately 18 percent of Americans are highly disposed to authoritarianism, according to their answers to four simple survey questions used by social scientists to estimate this disposition. A further 23 percent or so are just one step below them on the authoritarian scale.
“This roughly 40 percent of Americans tend to favor authority, obedience and uniformity over freedom, independence and diversity,” he says. “This group isn’t a monolith, and these findings don’t mean that 4 in 10 Americans prefer dictatorship to democracy. Authoritarianism is best understood not as a policy preference, the way we talk about lower taxes or strong defense, but rather as a worldview that can be ‘activated’ in the right historical moment by anyone with a big enough megaphone who is willing to play on voters’ fears and insecurities.
“When activated by fear, authoritarian-leaning Americans are predisposed to trade civil liberties for strongman solutions to secure law and order; and they are ready to strip civil liberties from those defined as the ‘other’ — a far cry from the image of America as a country built on a shared commitment to liberty and democratic governance.”
Related research explored the effects of hostile sexism and racism in America, and found that too was a factor in Trump’s success.
Then as I wrote in a three part series in February, 2020, the month before Covid hit the U.S., existential anxiety leads to authoritarianism.
How Existential Anxiety Leads to Authoritarianism
It’s too early to say what might happen in the 2024 election cycle, although it is hard to be optimistic considering the obvious split in public opinion and the splintering of our communications system.
According to Hakeem Jeffries, the new Minority Leader in the House, “Our democracy is (still) under attack. These right-wing extremists can never be trusted. Full stop,” he recently said in an email blast to supporters.
“Extreme MAGA Republicans are working behind closed doors to enact a far-right agenda that threatens the fundamental rights of everyday Americans,” he said, citing their efforts to ban history books and other books, to suppress voting rights for minorities and poor people, to end reproductive freedom for women, to cut Social Security and Medicare for the sick and elderly, to defund federal law enforcement, enact big tax cuts for the rich, the well-off and the well-connected, “all while promoting the false conspiracy theory that the twice-impeached former president won the 2020 election.”
Knowing that their best hope of political success is creating another existential crisis, the right-wing Republicans now in control of the House are trying to crash the economy to blame it on President Joe Biden.
According to the latest breaking news, President Biden and Speaker Kevin McCarthy say they have reached an agreement in principle to lift the debt limit for two years while cutting and capping some government spending over the same period, what The New York Times called “a breakthrough after a marathon set of crisis talks that has brought the nation within days of its first default in history.”
Congressional passage of the plan before June 5, when the Treasury is projected to exhaust its ability to pay its obligations, is not assured, particularly in the House, which plans to consider it on Wednesday. Republicans hold a narrow majority in the chamber, and right-wing lawmakers who had demanded significantly larger budget cuts in exchange for lifting the borrowing limit were already in revolt.
But the compromise, which would effectively freeze federal spending that had been on track to grow, had the blessing of both the Democratic president and the Republican speaker, raising hopes that it could break the fiscal stalemate that has gripped Washington and the nation for weeks, threatening an economic crisis.
If an agreement is not reached, and Social Security and disability payments are suspended or delayed, the subsequent recession or depression would create the existential crisis they need to once again take us to the brink of authoritarianism and dictatorship.
Let’s hope that doesn’t happen. I know what side I will be fighting on if this leads to another civil war. I will be right there with Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell in fighting fascism and dictatorship.
God Save Thee Ancient Mariner.
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Interesting historic parallels.