Everyone associates the word fascism with Hitler, concentration camps and WWII. What isn’t popularly taught in American schools is the fact that fascism as an ideal form of government was widely popular in the early 20th century around the world. In fact, as fascism spread from Mussolini’s Italy to other parts of Europe in the 1920’s, it became the conduit for wealthy industrialists in America to gain a foothold internationally.
Fascism is extremely pro-business and anti-union at its core. You can bet that 1930’s Corporate America was eager to supplant America’s progressively democratic administrative state with a fascist one.
Like today, the fascist supporters of 1930’s America were very vocal about their cause. They used print and radio propaganda and became very involved in American politics and elections. With its pro-business agenda, the Republican Party was the perfect conduit to bring fascist proposals to life. Eighty years later, these ideas and propaganda methods are alive and well and popular within the GOP.
As early as 1934, fascists became active in many state and national Republican party organizations. These organizations were also collaborating with pro-fascist groups such as America First Organization, the Silver Shirts and the Order of ‘76. Corporate members of the Republican party even used their wealth to sponsor anti-Semitic radio broadcasts to win German votes. That the Republican party is sympathetic to alt-right hate groups such as the KKK and is willing to promote and incite civil unrest is another parallel between 1930’s America and Trump’s America.
Normalizing fascism was not that difficult to do in 1930’s America. It was promoted as a “remedy” to Russian Bolshevism and as such, made sense to many Americans who felt it reassuring to learn that Italy was not also going in that direction. On the surface, it seemed like a middle-class revolution that rose up to defeat socialism in any form. The possibility that fascism was a weapon that could be used for good made it easier for the general populace of 1930’s America to look the other way.
Trump’s Republican party uses similar tactics to normalize fascism, promoting it as a weapon that can be used for good. The main agenda of the fascist state is to dismantle regulatory laws as quickly as possible and reduce the corporate tax burden. Trump’s tax reform bill that heavily reduced corporate tax rates was touted as protecting American jobs by putting more money into the pockets of Big Business “Job Creators”. Their claim is that, awash with new money, corporations will hire more Americans (or avoid layoffs) and everyone will benefit. The idea that the general public might have to increase their own tax burden or suffer deep cuts to public services, but then be rewarded with less risk of losing their jobs, makes it easier for many Americans in 2018 to look the other way.
However, studies have shown that for every $1,000,000 that big corporations receive in tax breaks, approximately 75¢ is re-invested into the American economy. Very few new jobs are actually created, and company layoffs continue as planned. The vast majority of the extra money is kept back for corporate shareholders, moved into off-shore accounts and invested in securities and other stock interests.
In the 1930’s, intense hatred of minorities ran deep in America. Business interests were obsessed with preventing any type of unionizing, government work and social programs that would provide relief to the poverty-stricken Americans of the Great Depression. They saw every New Deal initiative as a way to empower African Americans and the immigrant community, thus depriving them of cheap labor. They feared that President Franklin D. Roosevelt would appoint liberal Supreme Court justices that would challenge Jim Crow laws. Like today’s political scene, the American fascists of 1930 found willing accomplices in the media and Congress that would help them unleash agitators to create domestic unrest and stir up ugly, racial hatred.
There is incontrovertible evidence in the congressional record that some of the biggest monopolies entered into secret agreements with fascist parties, most notably the Business Plot of 1933. Wealthy businessmen plotted to use an army of WWI veterans to overthrow President Franklin D. Roosevelt and install a fascist regime. The Bonus Army was made of veterans who were out of work and disgruntled with the US Government at that time. If it were not for the patriotism of US Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler, who reported the conspiracy to Congress, our country may have tipped the scales in favor of totalitarianism around the world.
It is important to note that even though there was clear evidence that these organizers were plotting against the US Government, no one was ever held accountable for any crimes. Much of the final report was not declassified until the 1960’s, and only then did the rest of the country learn how close we came to disaster.
As fascist ideals began to have a foothold in the 1930’s Republican Party, the congressmen and senators began a push to disrupt the business of government with obstructionist tactics and obfuscation.
They hated President Roosevelt’s New Deal most of all. They accused the Roosevelt administration of communism and declared that he was trying to march America toward a totalitarian socialist state. To combat the Democratic president’s programs, Republicans began openly declaring fascist ideas outright. Republican Senator Thomas Schall falsely claimed that Russian newspapers were touting Roosevelt as “the first Communist president of the United States”. Senator David Reed even stood on the floor of the Senate and declared: “I do not often envy other countries and their governments, but I say that if this country ever needed a Mussolini, it needs one now.”
Trump’s Republican party is similarly obsessed with repealing Democratic President Barack Obama’s legislation, particularly the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare. It’s interesting to note that they label the ACA as a gateway to socialism. In 2012, Republican Louie Gohmert said of the ACA, “How much more socialist can you get than a government telling everybody what they can do, what they can’t do, how they can live. Individual liberty is gone as soon as this bill is held constitutional.” Newt Gingrich likened the ACA to “Soviet tyranny”. Democratic lawmakers who voted for the bill even received death threats.
After the 2016 presidential election, White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon told the Hollywood Reporter that the Trump administration “will be as exciting as the 1930s, greater than the Reagan revolution – conservatives, plus populists, in an economic nationalist movement.”
When you compare 1930’s politics with today, you get an idea about how far the Republican party has come to installing an actual fascist regime in the White House. Only this time, instead of taking the White House by force, the Tea Party/GOP used the power of Citizens United, gerrymandering and voter suppression to take over all three branches of government, without a single shot being fired.
The Business Plot of 1933 failed. The Business Plot of 2016 did not.
You might ask: Is this a bad thing? Would it be ok to be just a teeny-weeny bit fascist, as author John T. Flynn put it in the 1930’s? You might also ask: Is it really true that the Republican party of today is a fascist party?
One of the most important tenants of fascism is limited government. The Republican party has always promoted “smaller government” as a rule. They want to cut unpopular social programs such as welfare or food stamps and say the savings will be passed on to the hard-working taxpayer. When the average American hears this, they think, “Yeah! Less spending sounds great, that means less taxes for me to pay!” But strangely, even though government social programs are getting cut, these new policies never seem to trickle down in the form of less taxes to the American people. Why is that?
The answer lies in the concentration of power. “Less government” translates to mean more power in the hands of less people. The less oversight and committees there are, the more power each member of congress will have to influence laws. The big business interests control the politicians with large donations that keep them in office. In exchange, the politicians create legislature in favor of the corporate interests, lowering their tax obligation, for instance, or removing expensive regulations that are imposed on corporations to ensure worker safety and cut down on pollution.
The umbrella of “less government” also means less oversight of regulations. Federal agencies that protect us are dismantled and repealed. In other words, the regulatory laws can be in place, but without an official government agency to enforce them and see to it that the regulations are being applied, there is no incentive for any business entity to follow those laws.
This is what separates fascism from communism. In a communist state, the control of the economy is in the hands of the central government. The government decides the allocation of resources and what products and services are provided. They take control of factories and industry. Privatization of utilities, mining operations and banks are not allowed. The government also decides what goods are produced, when they will be produced and at what price. In a communist state, the government taxes the poor and the wealthy alike to pay for the programs that they deem are in the “public interest”, whatever that may be. As a result, while the government is large and politicians wealthy, there is less of a gap between the richest and the poorest of the general populace.
In a fascist state, the control of the economy is in private hands. The economy remains under control of the wealthy elite, and these same mega-billionaire corporations control the direction of the government. Massive monetary donations ensure that they keep that control. In return, the tax burden is shifted from the wealthy onto the middle class. Money is then pulled away from federal social programs such as public education, healthcare spending and food/housing assistance, leaving a need for some other way to provide them at the state or private level. Privatization of public services such as transportation, education, energy and utilities, research, law enforcement and even prisons and military occur as those services are contracted out to for-profit third-party corporate agencies. An enormous gap between the wealthiest and poorest of the general populace is painfully evident. Since they can’t compete with the massive amount of campaign money, the average American has no choice but to adjust to the new way of doing things.
One of the most important key pieces in support of today’s American fascism was the passage of Citizens United in 2010. One hundred years earlier, in 1907, the great Republican President Theodore Roosevelt spoke against it in his address to Congress: “There is no enemy of free government more dangerous and more so insidious than the corruption of the electorate,” he said. “All contributions by corporations to any political committee or for any political purpose should be forbidden by law.”
This is how far the Republican party has come in 100 years. Citizens United is exactly what TR warned us would happen: a corruption of the electorate. Its passage opened the door for a new era of nasty political advertising, much of it untrue and all of it designed to sway public opinion to the extreme fringe edges of bias. Citizens United spawned Super PAC’s, which are basically money-laundering entities that are allowed to spend unlimited amounts of money from a virtually unrestricted range of sources, including corporations and even foreign interests. With this kind of money, a billionaire can push his own agenda, buy a politician’s loyalty or even install his own hand-picked politicians in office, and therefore influence the very foundation of our Constitution.
Combine billions of dollars with the popularity of Social Media and the biased slant of broadcast news and radio, and you discover that 2018 American fascism has a power that was not imaginable in 1930.
Totalitarian regimes use propaganda, terror and technology to maintain control over all aspects of private life. We saw fascism tried again and again in Europe, and we know it only leads to despotism, disaster and oppression. It is unthinkable that it could happen here, in America 2018. Or is it?
The key lesson of all this is that we must never become complacent about democracy. The United States of America is a Democratic Federal Republic, and as you can see, it should be our number one priority to ensure that it remains forever so.
(Note: Everything in this article is easily researched online and via newspaper archive services that contain media from the 1930’s. Knowledge is power.)
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