Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was incorrect when she called gangs of gun toting Tea Partiers disrupting town hall meetings “brown shirts.” But she wasn’t wrong. They were there to prevent Democratic Congressmen from explaining proposed health care reform legislation to their constituents in the same way fascist brown shirts broke up political meetings in Italy and Germany in the 1930s.
But Tea Partiers are not fascists; at least they don’t fit the textbook definition of the term. Fascists are opposed to democracy in every sense of the word; for them, it is the bedrock of evil, according to Walter Laqueur in his definitive book on the subject, Fascism, Past, Present, Future. Tea Partiers believe passionately in voting; but believe anyone who doesn’t vote as they do is evil.
Fascists infuse their politics with a religious zeal devised to justify their racial and ethnic prejudices. Evangelical Republicans, like so many Christians in the past, start with Christianity and manipulate it to justify their deep fears of change brought on by “liberals” in control of “the government”. Like Generalissimo Francisco Franco of Spain, they are “religious authoritarians” rather than fascists, according to Laqueur.
The balance of Tea Partiers is made up of fanatical libertarians allied with Evangelicals for the same reason the US and Great Britain allied with Stalin in WW II. They believe it is the lesser of two evils. As a result most of Eastern Europe endured 70 years more of jackboot tyranny. If the Republican Party becomes the Tea Party, the libbers may well find themselves in the same situation.
Tea Partiers, of course, do not wear uniform-like brown shirts as did their fascist counterparts of old. Most appeared at the warm weather protests in golf shirts, with the relatively small number of libbers in attendance wearing camouflage tees. When she referred to them as “brown shirts” Pelosi over-generalized and probably harmed the health care cause.
Had the Speaker called them “Republican golf shirts” she might have coined a new political aphorism. But hindsight is 20/20.
Like fascist officialdom, Republican Party officials eschew any connection with Tea Partiers, thereby providing themselves deniability should things get out of hand. If, for example, one of the gun toting partiers decided to blow someone away with the semi-automatic assault rifles and 44 magnums they carried to the town hall meetings “for protection”.
Hate-mouth radio blat jockey Rush Limbaugh and failed Republican Vice Presidential candidate, the dingbat Sarah Pallin, both dedicated toters and shooters, have assumed the “unofficial” leadership of the movement. This is all well and good for the Democratic Party, so long as President Barack Obama’s stimulus package and health care plan show real progress in the coming year.
If not, the electorate will start looking for more radical solutions, just as they did in 1931 when Hoover’s progressive approach to stimulating the economy failed. We have come to look at Hoover as an ultra-conservative on the order of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush; but a prescient article in Harper’s magazine points out that he was anything but. A close friend of Teddy Roosevelt, he was a “progressive” Republican who believed in government oversight and regulation of the economy.
The progressives were decimated by President William Howard Taft’s theft of the 1912 Republican presidential nomination and America’s entry into World War I, according to William Allen White, a Kansas newspaper publisher and editor who emerged as the national spokesman for progressive Republicanism. Hoover re-energized the party’s progressive wing with his outstanding organization of world hunger relief following the war and won the Republican presidential nomination in 1928.
The Harper’s article notes that Hoover used every method in the progressive arsenal to stimulate the economy, including bailing out banks. He encountered considerable opposition within his own party, as has Obama. Hoover’s secretary of state, whom he fired, welcomed the Great Depression declaring it would clear out bureaucratic dead wood, get the government out of business regulation, take care of the unions once and for all and put the country back on sound financial footing.
Sound familiar? Well, Franklin Delano Roosevelt brought the radical solution needed in 1933 from the left of the progressive political spectrum. The center had failed. From what direction will the radical solution come this time? Sarah Pallin is counting on it coming from the far right; so are her Republican golf shirts. They offer freedom; so did Generalissimo Franco.
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