A Fascist America: How Close Are We? Essay -- essays research papers

The bringing close together that the States is turning fascist has been popular on the Left for as long as I can remember in the 1960s, when antiwar radicals raged against the Machine, this descriptor of hyperbole dominated campus semi governmental discourse and even made its agency into the mainstream. When the radical Weather Underground went into ultra-Left meltdown and began issuing incoherent "communiqus" to an indifferent American public, they invariably signed off by declaring " finish to the fascist insect pig that preys on the life of the people" such(prenominal) rhetoric, too overheated for American tastes, was quite obviously an exaggeration America in the 1960s was no more "fascistic" than miniskirts, Hula Hoops, and the rhyme demagoguery of Spiro T. Agnew. Furthermore, we werent even close to fascism, as the downf exclusively of Richard M. Nixon made all too clear to whatever incipient authoritarians were nurtured at the breast of the GOP. cover version in those halcyon days, America was, in effect, practically immune from the fascist virus that had wreaked such havoc in Europe and Asia in previous(prenominal) decades there was a kind of innocence, back then, that acted as a vaccinum against this dreaded affliction. Fascism the demonic offspring of war was practically a curious to American soil. After all, it had been a century since America had been a battleground, and the intellect of invulnerability that is the hallmark of youth permeated our politics and culture. Nothing could hurt us we were forever young. But as we moved into the new millennium, Americans acquired a experience of their own mortality an acute awareness that we could be hurt, and badly. That is the legacy of 9/11.Blessed with a double bulwark against foreign invasion the Atlantic and Pacific oceans America hasnt experienced the atomizing effects of large-scale military remainder on its soil since the Civil War. On that occasion, youll r emember, Lincoln, the "Great Emancipator," nearly liberate the U.S. government from the chains of the Constitution by shutting down newspapers, jailing his political opponents, and cutting a swathe of destruction through the South, which was occupied and enured like a conquered province years after Lee surrendered. He was the closest to a dictator that any American president has have it remote besides George W. Bush may well surpass him, given the possibilities that straightaway prese... ...tting out all political opposition, and arresting thousands on account of their political and religious convictions in Uzbekistan. How farthermost are such people from rationalizing the akin sort of regime in the U.S.?At least one enceinte neocon has made the case for censorship, in the name of maintaining "morality" but now, it seems to me, the "national security" rationalization go away do just as well, if not better. McConnell is right that we are not yet in the time lag of a fully developed fascist system, and the conservative movement is far from thoroughly neoconized. But we are a single terrorist incident away from all that a bomb placed in a midpoint or on the Golden Gate Bridge, or a biological attack of some kind, could sweep away the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and two centuries of legal, political, and heathenish traditions all of it wiped out in a single instant, by centre of a single act that would tip the balance and push us into the abyss of post-Constitutional history. The trap is readied, baited, and waiting to be sprung. Whether the American people will fall into it when the time comes that is the nightmare that haunts the dreams of patriots.