Books about scary religious people are something of a preferred genre in our house. Look around and you'll find Bruce Bawer's While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within, Michelle Goldberg's Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, Sam Harris's The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason, Chris Mooney's The Republican War on Science, Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, Dan Wakefield's The Hijacking of Jesus: How the Religious Right Distorts Christianity and Promotes Prejudice and Hate, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Albert Menendez's Three Voices of Extremism: Charles Colson, James Dobson, D. James Kennedy and Kevin Phillips's American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century, to name only those I've read or re-read in the last two years.
I suppose I read these books for the same reason people watch horror movies. There's the secure back-of-the-brainpan knowledge that the really bad stuff hasn't happened, couldn't happen, won't happen, coupled with the nagging doubt that hey, maybe it could.
In a recent post, I mentioned Chris Hedges' new book, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. In an even earlier post, I noted that I was put off by the title, which seemed over-the-top, but that I'd be getting to it soon.
I did, and doubts about the title notwithstanding, I recommend it highly.
Hedges doesn't toss the F-word around casually. He prefaces the book with Umberto Eco's essay on Eternal Fascism. Eco lists fourteen features of what he calls Ur-Fascism, which I will summarize thus:
1. A cult of tradition.
2. A rejection of modernism.
3. A cult of action
4. A rejection of distinctions.
5. A fear of difference and disagreement.
6. A grounding in social frustration.
7. An obsession with plots.
8. A sense of humiliation by one's enemies.
9. A view of life as eternal struggle.
10. An elitist contempt for the weak.
11. A hero cult.
12. A cult of masculinity.
13. A selective populism.
14. A use of Newspeak.
Hedges takes his readers on a tour through the wacky world of dominionist Christianity in support of this thesis:
Dominionism seeks to redefine traditional democratic and Christian terms and concepts to fit an ideology that calls on the radical church to take political power. It shares many prominent features with classical fascist movements . . . .
He convinced me that the dominionist movement is congruent to the features of fascism that Eco describes. This is, however, not precisely the same thing as saying that religious fundamentalists are fascists. My guess is that that subtlety wouldn't make for a provocative book title and that Hedges, who is a calm and graceful writer, was talked into the more inflammatory title by his publisher. No matter; if we shouldn't judge a book by its cover, then the title of this book shouldn't deter anyone trying to understand the growth of fundamentalist political Christianity from reading American Fascists.
Three points from the book were especially interesting to me. The first was about the destruction of the manufacturing class:
The loss of manufacturing jobs has dealt a body blow to the American middle class. Manufacturing jobs accounted for 53 percent of the economy in 1965; by 1988 they accounted for 39 percent. By 2004 they accounted for 9 percent.
I live in the rust belt of Ohio, so these figures shouldn't come as a surprise to me. But like so many other bloggers, I haven't worked in an auto plant or a mill and haven't seen the pink slips firsthand. These numbers are stunning; what are all the people who used to work in manufacturing doing for a living now? Hedges thinks he knows: they are succumbing to the phony hope peddled by televangelists, megachurches and politicoreligious leaders such as Dobson, Kennedy and Robertson.
The second point concerns architecture and suburban design. Hedges points to the blight of hideous commercial buildings that cluster in every city and town in America. He describes our inherently isolating suburban landscape that disconnects each house from its neighbors and its community. These, he claims, are partially responsible for the despair that drives people into the arms of the religious right. I've frequently thought that there must be a direct relationship between the amount of space--both literal and figurative--between people's houses and the propensity of the residents to reject liberalism's view of society as a web of interdependencies. I've also thought that "community" would make a great theme for liberals to organize around. Hedges shows how the yearning for connection impels people toward fundamentalist Christianity; I still think that these same yearnings could be harnessed by the the right kind of progressive movement.
Finally, Hedges is properly contemptuous of liberals who raise tolerance to such privileged status that they are willing to tolerate anything--even intolerance. Referring to this as "the paradox of tolerance," he calls upon liberals to grow a pair:
Anger, when directed against movements that would abuse the weak, preach bigotry and injustice, trample the poor, crush dissent and impose a religious tyranny, is a blessing. . . . Liberal institutions, seeing tolerance as the highest virtue, tolerate the intolerant. They swallow the hate talk that calls for the destruction of nonbelievers. Mainstream believers have often come to the comfortable conclusion that any form of announced religiosity is acceptable . . . . Most liberals, the movement has figured out, will stand complacently to be sheared like sheep, attempting to open dialogues and reaching out to those who spit venom in their faces.
I realized a long time ago that ignoring homophobia, racism and irrationality made me miserable and emboldened the people who espoused those attitudes. By showing us the boundaries of this trap that so many well-meaning progressives fall into, Hedges has done those of us who call ourselves liberals a tremendous favor.
Some of your summary points from Umberto Eco were a tad too summarized for my understanding. In particular:
4. A rejection of distinctions.
Is that all distinctions? Some particular distinctions? A rejection of subtlety, leaving only gross distinctions?
10. An elitist contempt for the weak.
How is that different from ordinary contempt for the weak?
Posted by: Craig Ewert | January 31, 2007 at 08:24 PM
Regarding distinctions, here is what Eco says: "The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge. For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason." I think this is a rather odd formulation; the first sentence doesn't seem to have much to do with the other two.
Read in context with the rest of the essay, I think Eco is getting at what Craig Ewert described as "[a] rejection of subtlety, leaving only gross distinctions." To make subtle distinctions is to find ways to disagree with the edicts of the state, which, as Eco says, is verboten under fascism.
As for the elitist contempt for the weak, again I will quote Eco: "Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology, insofar as it is fundamentally aristocratic, and aristocratic and militaristic elitism cruelly implies contempt for the weak. Ur-Fascism can only advocate a popular elitism. Every citizen belongs to the best people in the world, the members of the part are the best among the citizens, every citizen can (or ought to) become a member of the party. But there cannot be patricians without plebeians. In fact, the Leader, knowing that his power was not delegated to him democratically but was conquered by force, also knows that his force is based upon the weakness of the masses; they are so weak as to need and deserve a ruler."
I summarized this as "elitist contempt for the weak," but perhaps I ought to have said "contempt by the elite for the weak."
JFT
Posted by: James F. Trumm | February 01, 2007 at 12:00 AM