… argues George Monbiot in this fascinating article titled Religion Of The Rich.
He notes that there is much talk these days about the advent of “soft fascism” following Bush’s election as President of the USA, but argues it just isn’t so. In fact he points that finger at “us”.
“If Bush wins”, the US writer Barbara Probst Solomon claimed just before the election, “fascism is possible in the United States.” Blind faith in a leader, she said, a conservative working class and the use of fear as a political weapon provide the necessary preconditions.
She’s wrong. So is Richard Sennett, who described Bush’s security state as “soft fascism” in the Guardian last month. So is the endless traffic on the internet. In The Anatomy of Fascism, Robert Paxton persuasively describes it as “… a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity”.
It is hard to read Republican politics in these terms. Fascism recruited the elite, but it did not come from the elite. It relied on hysterical popular excitement: something which no one could accuse George Bush of provoking.
(note to Monbiot – George, it depends upon which horde of voters you’re attempting to describe here, methinks).
He goes on to unwind his perspective, looking back at history, about how the commercial classes – traders, merchants, lenders, bankers, industrialists – developed a theological justification for commercialism, which had at its core an “idealization of personal responsibility”
From there he continues to unbundle the historical evidence of how capitalism has developed, unfolded and evolved, and finishes with a grand flourish of inevitability.
All this was in the 1630’s or so. Looks like history is back, and she’s hungry !
Of course, the Puritans differed from Bush’s people in that they worshipped production but not consumption. But this is just a different symptom of the same disease. Tawney characterises the late Puritans as people who believed that “the world exists not to be enjoyed, but to be conquered. Only its conqueror deserves the name of Christian.”
There were some, such as the Levellers and the Diggers, who remained true to the original spirit of the Reformation, but they were violently suppressed. The pursuit of adulterers and sodomites provided an ideal distraction for the increasingly impoverished lower classes.
Ronan Bennett’s excellent new novel, Havoc in Its Third Year, about a Puritan revolution in the 1630s, has the force of a parable.(11) An obsession with terrorists (in this case Irish and Jesuit), homosexuality and sexual licence, the vicious chastisement of moral deviance, the disparagement of public support for the poor: swap the black suits for grey ones, and the characters could have walked out of Bush’s America.
So why has this ideology resurfaced in 2004? Because it has to. The enrichment of the elite and impoverishment of the lower classes requires a justifying ideology if it is to be sustained. In the United States this ideology has to be a religious one. Bush’s government is forced back to the doctrines of Puritanism as an historical necessity. If we are to understand what it’s up to, we must look not to the 1930s, but to the 1630s.
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