In perhaps most revolting, depressing news story that I’ve ever read, The New York Times shows that the Republican Party has bared the ugliest of its ugly bottom as many of its elected officials and media champions, prompted partly by Elon Musk, assert without evidence that Paul Pelosi and David DePape were having an extramarital gay affair.
Coming atop the Gross Old Party’s other, bigger lies about the 2020 election, the January 6 insurrection, and the supposed “integrity” of its strategies to subvert the coming elections, the Times report merely confirms that something very like a mass psychosis has gripped not only Republican Party leaders but also tens of millions of addled sheep who’ll follow these bad shepherds over the cliff today, dragging us all toward a horror that anyone who knows anything about the last century will have to call for what it is: Fascism really has come to America.
When I wrote four years ago, here in the Berkshire Edge, that I was becoming disillusioned with the Republican Party that I’d grown up respecting, I had no idea of how absurdly awful the party would actually become. And when the Yale philosopher Jason Stanley, whose parents were refugees from Nazi Germany, wrote How Fascism Works in 2018 and hired a publicist, virtually waving his arms and shouting about fascism coming to America, I thought that he was being histrionic, if not neurotic.
Historical analogies can be facile and dangerous, but the very ludicrousness of Republicans’ handling of the assault on Pelosi requires us to acknowledge that an unnervingly broad swath of the American public really is psychotic, confirming my own premonition, on July 4, 2014, about the derangement of “a nation spinning apart.”
Never mind that it had been coming even in 1973, when 7,000 American teenagers massed in Boston to receive “perfect knowledge” from an adolescent Guru Maharaj-Ji. What matters is that now, as then, there is a real thirst, a spiritual exhaustion, that conjures up images of Jerusalem in the times of Amos and Jesus, or of Rome in the fifth century—times of great imperial power and of popular restlessness and emotional collapse.
Granting that the guru’s Boston appearance in Boston was merely an evening’s free entertainment for many in his audience, I was unnerved by his statement that, ‘Just imagine, I have a following of six million people; whatever I tell them to do, they would be most pleased to do it.’
Sound familiar? Now, as then, progressives like those of us who bemoaned that spectacle in Boston and who want our spiritual needs to be more integrated with something like freedom of choice and political potency must wonder what we’ve done to abet or even deserve the spectacle that’s unfolding before us in the Times story and in the mid-term campaigns.
Probably we’ve failed to ask ourselves some deep questions about needs for faith and for emotional sustenance that millions of Americans have been looking for and that progressive politics hasn’t provided.
But this isn’t mainly about us “godless” liberals, as today’s Republicans insist. It’s much more about some questions that conservatives haven’t asked themselves—questions about human needs for choice and political agency. A few conservative thinkers are indeed asking such questions, as I describe at some length in an essay on The History News Network. Unfortunately, they’re answering those questions about freedom of choice and political participation badly.
To their credit, John Daniel Davidson and Jon Askonas, the conservative thinkers whom I mention on HNN, are backing off a bit from rigid, Reaganite “supply-side” dogmas. But they’re moving instead toward seizing the power of the administrative state, the very entity that Steve Bannon has condemned and wanted to dismantle. They want to use it now to bring order and public virtue to Silicon Valley technocracy and unruly masses, under the tutelage of a conservative ruling elite.
These thinkers aren’t flirting with Bernie Sanders’ democratic socialism or Joe Biden’s new New Deal. They’re edging closer to the vaguely Roman Catholic “common good Constitutionalism” of Harvard Law Prof. Adrian Vermeule and several of the current Supreme Court justices, or even to the 19th century German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s authoritarian, ethno-nationalist welfare state. But Bismarck’s racist, imperialist, full-employment state presaged the oxymoronic “national socialism” of the German political party that later incorporated that phrase into its name and public promises, presaging our own American, fascist Republican Party.
