I guess I should say before I go any further that I don’t think the Tea Party is straightforwardly fascist. I think it’s useful to measure the Party against historical fascism, to identify the points of convergence as well as the differences, simply in order to clarify what might yet happen in the U.S., but if we’re being thorough, those differences will also matter.
That said, I still want to begin with the easy stuff, by naming the obvious resemblances, the points where the Tea Party has already donned the jackboots. You don’t have to read these affinities as a plain indictment, but we should seriously examine why some people, when asked if the Tea Party is fascist, wouldn’t hesitate to say “of course.”
Let’s start with the nationalism. The Tea Party proclaims that gently loving America isn’t enough: true patriots will wrap themselves in the red-white-and-blue and shout from the mountaintops that America is the best country in the world. They will root and then they will toot. “Nationalism,” in fact, doesn’t even begin to describe it. One thing about hyper-nationalists of this kind: They sure do love some old flags; the American flag is great, but it flies in front of every elementary school and post office, and if you want to signal an allegiance more intense than that of a Cub Scout, you’re going to need something historical and recondite—the don’t-tread-on-me Gadsden flag in the Tea Party’s case, which in this sense has become a rather precise functional substitute for the Confederate flag that no serious person is allowed to fly any longer. The Tea Partiers aren’t yet sporting tri-corner hats and knee-breeches—well, some of them are—but their banners will never touch the ground. Feeding their hyper-nationalism is the paranoia that immigrants and smug lefties are systematically dismantling the liberties they heroically defend. The position does make for some easy judgments: there is no equivocation, nuance or diplomacy needed – only the understanding that America the Beautiful is the Number-One Country That Has Ever Existed and must be defended against all enemies: enemies from without, Mexicans sneaking across the locked-down southern border, Muslims sneaking across the unguarded northern one, and enemies from within, too, Japanese-Americans in need of a round-up or gay people fired en masse from the State Department.
OK, so those last two aren’t exactly recent. But then that’s the thing about this kind of aggressive patriotism. It isn’t especially new, and it isn’t the distinguishing mark of either the Tea Party or fascism. Nationalism has always been a big part of the generic right-wing platform, shoring up an American identity and culture presumed white on both fronts. The rhetoric is familiar: it’s us versus them; protect America; deport illegals; fire radicals when you can’t arrest them. The history here is a long one, from this year’s controversial Arizona law to the 1924 Immigration Act, designed to stop the flow of Southern Europeans and Jews to America, to the anti-Catholic fears of the Know-Nothings in the 1850s. On this front, just about the only thing new about the Tea Party is that some of them are Italian, which I guess in this case counts as integration. One self-described Tea Partier I know says it better than me. “It is the People. It is the People who will return us to a nation 'Of the People.'” Now one tweak: Read those sentences again, but substitute for the word People, which my friend has already helpfully capitalized, its German equivalent. “It is the Volk. It is the Volk who will return us to a nation ‘Of the Volk.’” Bear in mind, too: My friend wrote this when he was trying to explain to me why the Tea Party wasn’t fascist. But then Fascism utterly emphasized the People. It wanted to create a nation of the strong and the healthy and the pure, not dirtied by the dark and the radical.
I think what my friend means is that the Baggers are a populist movement and that when a sizeable minority of people mobilize, it by definition has to be a democratic movement—to which I would say that before you can declare it democratic, you have to know where the Tea Party lies on the political spectrum. And one often gets the feeling that the Tea Party itself doesn’t even know where it lies on the political spectrum and certainly doesn’t understand that an organization can be democratic in form but still not in content—that it can be democratically organized and still not believe in democracy. Stanley Payne’s description of fascism – a description that is loose enough to allow for the variants that spread across Europe in the inter-war period – is helpful. There have been many variants of fascism; Nazi Germany was only the most radical manifestation; but none of the historical fascisms, not even the Nazi one, involved cartoonish dictators wresting political control from democratically elected leaders and forcing an unwilling public into its authoritarian regime. Payne explains that fascism had its origins in mass populist movements which were usually better organized than those found on the left. Those movements were steered by small but numerous meetings where “the goal was to envelop the participant in a mystique and community of ritual that appealed to the religious as well as to the merely political” (11). The Tea Party’s right-wing grassroots movement has developed enough critical mass to become a political force, and it has pulled this off mostly via small meetings, groupuscules that combine a sixth-grader’s Johnny Tremain vision of the Founding Fathers with a singularly uncharitable version of Christianity. This makes it seem at least a little bit like a nascent fascist movement.
Fascism also embraces the “positive evaluation of and willingness to use force” (Payne 12). The name Tea Party is, of course, oddly genteel, suggesting as it does crumpets, but its violence is plain to see: its romance with the Second Amendment and militias; the guns that Tea Partiers have been bringing to rallies; Sarah Palin endlessly crying “don’t retreat, reload!”; a Tea Party leader in Montana asking to get the Wyoming manual on “hanging fruits,” Matthew Shepard-style; not to mention the rash of brick-throwing that occurred after the health-care bill passed. The Tea Party is rife with violence potential and real and what’s more, openly endorses it. New York gubernatorial Tea Party candidate Carl Paladino’s statement that he would “take out” a reporter who pressed him on an extra-marital affair, his promise to leave his opponent’s “blood on the floor,” and that he would take a baseball bat to Albany’s legislators--these show his willingness to threaten bloodshed. Let it start adding-up: grassroots hyper-nationalists who openly advocate violence.
But then here’s one facet of the issue that I have found especially striking: The Tea Party’s rage is coming from people who already hold power. As the demographics show, Tea Partiers trend white, male, wealthy and educated; the very group that has had economic, political and social power in this country since its inception, the beginning they long to return to. Ongoing shifts in the country’s racial makeup—and the racism that accompanies them – can no longer be ignored. Don’t believe that the Tea Party is about race?—perhaps because some TPers insist that it isn’t. I’m going to let a picture do my talking:
The Tea Party’s racism against Obama is so eye-rollingly obvious that it would be boring if it wasn’t also ugly and craven and dangerous. Swapping emails that portray the president as a pimp; suggesting he eat fried chicken rather than host an inauguration dinner; Dick Armey helpfully explaining that “it’s not who Obama is, it is what he is”—the racism against Obama is so lived-in that Tea Partiers barely see it. But those that make up the Tea Party—those white middle-class people that have up until now been the power-holders in this country – are experiencing, somewhat ahead of the curve, the shock that democracy deals to political minorities. Minorities will tend to believe, almost by definition, that what the majority is doing is wrong. Affluent baby- and echo-boomers are crying out that they are suffering from racism, claiming a sort of weird faux-victimhood and coming up with more and more extreme reasons for why their rage should be taken seriously. Now we hear from boomers who, having raised their own children, no longer want their taxes to pay for schools and social programs that would benefit growing black and Latino populations. Now we hear the baby boomers who want to take the working poor off Medicaid to ensure their social security. Actually, let me rephrase that: I’m the one forced to listen to that last group. Maybe two weeks back, I sat in a coffeehouse near my house while a well-nourished, well-dressed, sixty-something boomer proclaimed very loudly that all poor people in America should be dropped from government programs because they were taking money away that was due to him in his retirement. It is one of the hallmarks of the Tea Party that they treat ordinary forms of power-sharing, as exist in all advanced democracies, as a complete and intolerable disempowerment.
To some extent, though, I don’t want to put too much emphasis on the anti-Obama racism, because the baseline test of political intelligence at the moment is whether or not a person registers the completely stinking obvious parallels between Islamophobia and historical anti-Semitism: the widespread notion that these people from the Middle East—Semites, indeed—cannot be assimilated to a white and Christian culture and will persist as a dangerous leftover; the massive confusion of religious and racial categories; the attacks on religious buildings; insinuations of shadowy and globe-spanning money networks; the suspicion of a people who follow an alternate law; the sense that this foreign religion has a unique capacity for violence. (The Jews, we’ll remember, were once after the blood of Christian babies.) That list is helpful, but it is also rather abstract. I think I can show you something more concrete that should render further argument unnecessary. Here’s a recent caricature of Osama Bin Laden:
And now here’s one of the most famous images of the Nazi era, a film poster for Jud Süss, which you can think of as a kind of Jew-bashing Casablanca:
Indeed, the construction of Muslims as the Enemy is now so complete one has a hard time remembering through the fog that President George W. Bush said after the September 11 attacks that America was not at war with Islam, but with extremism. That sentiment today strikes many on the Right as hopelessly naïve, as new-model anti-Semites like David Horowitz, Pamela Geller and Bill O’Reilly insist that indeed Christian America is at war with Islam and its people. One can simply follow the timeline of responses on the Park51 community center to watch the hate-mongers unload their wares: it went in no time from a non-issue that even Laura Ingraham approved of to a complete barn- and book-burner. What’s more, it served to formalize Islamophobia as a mass movement; rallies in California, Tennessee, and Florida were held to protest mosques in those places. It would be possible to believe that the Right was sincere in its belief that southern Manhattan should, exceptionally, be treated as hallowed ground, if it weren’t simultaneously fighting Islamic buildings in the unhallowed strip malls and suburbs of the nation. From the Tea Party crowd in Manhattan harassing a man they took to be Muslim (but who was actually a construction worker from the World Trade Center site wearing a skull cap; the mix-up is emblematic of the movement’s blind, blundering rage) to Pastor Terry Jones’s threat to torch Korans on 9/11, along with soaring reports of vandalism against mosques nationally, the anti-Muslim rhetoric and assault on Islam repeat, almost ritually, earlier European attacks on Jews. Only a clod adheres to anti-Semitism in its historical form; that’s the fringe domain of Holocaust deniers and nitwit Nazi reenactors like Ohio Tea Party candidate Rich Iott, who recently defended German fascists as men who “were doing what they thought was right for their country. And they were going out and fighting what they thought was a bigger, you know, a bigger evil." The Tea Party’s infinitely more insidious service to anti-Semitism has been to give it a living target.
Payne, Stanley G. Fascism: Comparison and Definition. Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980.
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