Christo-Fascism, what it looks like and how it acts.
Just some musings and observations about how one can have misconceptions about what Fascism looks like.
When people imagine what Fascism is, most Americans picture the regimented discipline of the Nazis or the iron fisted despotism of Duterte in the Philippines or Modi in India. The truth is that, for fascism to work it has to clothe itself in the traditions, practices and culture that it springs forth within. When you imagine fascism in America you should see it as some mixture of a Trump rally and January 6th. Everything from singing and dancing to “YMCA” by The Village People to beating police with your “Appeal to Heaven'' flag on its PVC flagpole. Here it must, by its very nature, wrap itself in the American flag while seeking to deny human rights to people who don’t look like them, don’t practice their religion or believe the same myths about American Exceptionalism they do. Don’t look around your neighborhood and assume that because you don’t see people goose-stepping that there aren’t fascists or people who sympathize with fascism. The socialists who were slaughtered during the “Night of the Long Knives” probably didn’t suspect the people killing them to be fascists before they showed up, but there they were. (A fact that’s important to remember the next time someone tries to tell you that the Nazis were “Socialists”, because “it’s in their name, dude!”)
The way I picture it is that in the 70s and 80s I always observed Christians as being like Father Mulcahy on MASH, nice people who are kind of prudish, urge you to think of others and God, but generally sweet. In fact the ones in positions of power were most likely more like Frank Burns, paranoid right wingers who see progress as an attack on their country. By the 90s my perception had morphed more toward Christians being like Ned Flanders, a little annoying with the moralizing and judgment, but mostly harmless, when in fact the politically active ones were much more like Mister Burns...same last name, but add evil self interest. This is to say that I’ve not necessarily been mistaken about who I perceived my fellow faithful to be, I just underestimated who they were being led by, what their ideologies truly were and how a tiny minority of religious authorities could cooperate with Business and Politically powerful forces to pull together a dangerous core of fascists and sympathizers with fascism. The good news is that less than a third of 22,465 Americans surveyed by the PRRI adhere to or sympathize with Christian Nationalism and it’s theocratic goals, the bad news is that 3 out of 10 of Americans adhere to or sympathize with Christian Nationalism.
Dating back to Anglo-Christian imperialism and it’s presumption that their might and violence against indigenous people across the globe was ordained by God, that exploiting, enslaving and converting people they came across as they sailed the seas was part and parcel with their Freedom to Dominate, there has always been a portion of Christianity which presumed that their imposition of their faith was the norm, and any degradation of their right to force their religion on others is a violation of some right granted to them by their creator. When, in today’s society, anything blocks them from doing this, from stopping the mandatory placement of the trappings of Christianity in the public square at taxpayer expense to their God given right to hear a grocery store employee wish them “Merry Christmas” or any other infringement upon the privilege they’ve enjoyed for so many centuries, they choose to see it as an attack upon their very faith and existence, while ignoring that they regularly call for the end to the existence of LGBTQ people, non-believers and anybody else they decide to literally demonize. After all, that’s just how they handled problematic people in the Crusades, as the East India Trading Company and throughout “Manifest Destiny”...
What we end up with is something I call “The ChrISIS”, a very loud minority of the population who seek to create a Christian Nationalist Caliphate within the United States. It’s a political movement disguised as a religious concern that’s perfectly willing to win at all costs, including at the expense of our democracy. And make no mistake, just because they are currently focused on Christianity as being the “norm” that they seek to enforce, they won’t stop there. While they point back at a time when Christianity was the norm, they’re pointing back at a Jim Crow, pre-suffrage America. There’s nothing to stop winding the clock back to a time in our nation when only property owners could vote, people of color couldn’t own property or even when people of color WERE property. It doesn’t need to be as overt as chattel slavery, but even chattel slavery was explained away by God fearing Christians in the 17th and 18th centuries. The Southern states are full of cities and towns where the ancestors of one church had been the owners of the ancestors of the church down the road.
They are a loudly vocal minority who have infiltrated the highest positions in local, state and federal government. They seek to obtain the White House with the re-election of Donald Trump and then begin making sweeping changes which they anticipate will be given the sheen of legitimacy by the great many courts into which they have seated judges, including the Supreme Court. They have expressed their intention to undo civil servant protections so that any dissenters can be removed from government, that loyalty tests will weed out other top level leadership and that they may even attempt to remove 14th amendment protections for the citizenship of children born to foreign parents and 22nd amendment restrictions on the number of terms a president can serve.
This is how democracies have been destroyed around the planet, by electing people who through force of will and a cult of personality can undo the democratic protections against governmental abuse of power to remove enemies, disenfranchise those who oppose these changes and fortify their continued reign in order to obtain de facto dictatorship status…this is what Putin has done in Russia, and so it should surprise nobody that so many of Trump’s allies are huge fans of the former KGB head.
In 1960 George Lincoln Rockwell, inventor of Holocaust denial, coiner of the term “White Power” and founder of the American Nazi Party announced his endorsement of Richard M. Nixon in his bid for president. Nixon responded by stating in a television interview, “I completely repudiate him and all the evil he represents”. Donald Trump had antisemitic Hitler endorser Kanye West and neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes over to Mar A Lago for a dinner. What a difference 60 years can make.