The Rise of Pseudo Fascism

By David Neiwert, The American Street

(excerpt)

Today we have a milieu in which this administration’s manifest incompetence is hailed as moral clarity; in which the torture of prisoners at American hands is dismissed as a fraternity prank; in which the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II is defended as a necessary step (that may need to be repeated); in which a policy to further denude America’s forests is called the Healthy Forests Initiative, and the evisceration of the nation’s public education system is named No Child Left Behind. We’re relentlessly sold an image of Bush himself as strong and resolute, and yet when he appears for a national debate on TV, what we see instead is a “peevish and bored” caricature of a leader, a man more likely to remind us the feckless pointy-haired boss we all once had than an actual president.

At times it seems, when dealing with the modern conservative movement, as if we’ve entered a gigantic and remorseless mirror funhouse. Or more to the point, a dark and labyrinthine cavern, twisting in an endless maze, whose architecture we can only vaguely discern through upheld torches.

Every now and then, though, someone within the movement hierarchy – often one at the very top – will let slip a bit of the curtain, flashing a little light on the vastness and shape of the metastatic architecture of the conservative movement. When it happens, it can be a little like the scene in Aliens when Ripley’s flamethrower lights up the interior of the lair into which she has wandered.

[more]