I haven't read Chris Hedges' book, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. To be honest, I'm put off by the alarmist title. There are certainly scary religious people in abundance these days, but that doesn't mean that fascism is imminent.
I may have to get past those sentiments. Hedges has an article-length version of his thesis up on AlterNet, and it's pretty interesting. Hedges describes a middle class that has been hollowed out, betrayed by both corporations and government. Here's the money graf:
They hated this world. And they willingly walked out on this world for the mythical world offered by these radical preachers, a world of magic, a world where God had a divine plan for them and intervened on a daily basis to protect them and perform miracles in their lives. The rage many expressed to me towards those who challenge this belief system, to those of us who do not accept that everything in the world came into being during a single week 6,000 years ago because it says so in the Bible, was a rage born of fear, the fear of being plunged back into a reality-based world where these magical props would no longer exist, where they would once again be adrift, abandoned and alone.
These people became foot soldiers in the armies of James Dobson and Pat Robertson.
It struck me, upon reading this, that a parallel analysis along these lines has frequenly been deployed to explain the appeal of radical Islam. Writing about Islamic terrorism in Policy Review, Michael J. Mazarr argues:
The security threats the United States faces today have everything to do with the pressures of modernity and globalization, the diaphanous character of identity, the burden of choice, and the vulnerability of the alienated. That is not all that they have to do with, and the influence of psychological factors lies in a larger context of socioeconomic, cultural, demographic, and other realities. Yet those material issues become most relevant, and most dangerous, when they are breathing life into latent psychological distress.
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