American writer in British newspaper: America is Fascist

Crazy Naomi Wolf (I ruefully note the fact that my ancestral tribe produces a disproportionate number of serious crazies) writes in the Guardian that America is being transformed into a fascist state. Literally. She goes through ten steps by which a country becomes fascist, her main model being Nazi Germany, and purports to demonstrate how America under Adolph Benito Bush is doing all ten of them. This is not a mere column, her argument is quite long and detailed. Wolf is serious about this (seriously crazy). The article is based on a recent book of hers called The End of America. But, you may ask, how could a left-liberal think that America is coming to an end, when so much of American culture and politics is moving steadily to the left? The answer is that, even as America keeps moving to the left, the left has gone so far left (so far crazy) that it sees anything in America that has not yet turned leftist as fascist.

Of Wolf’s ten steps toward fascism, my favorite is number three, “Develop a thug caste.” This consists of “paramilitary groups of scary young men” who are sent out to “terrorise citizens.” And what, you may wonder, is Wolf’s example of this dread development in Bush’s America? “Groups of angry young Republican men,” she writes, “dressed in identical shirts and trousers [italics added], menaced poll workers counting the votes in Florida in 2000.”

I love this, because the incident to which she refers had to do with a group of Republican observers in a Florida court house in November 2000 (the sinister “identical shirts” were white dress shirts and ties, which Wolf, in full Theodore Adorno mode, sees as a Nazi Brown Shirt uniform), when the ballot counting was suddenly moved to a closed room where the process could no longer be observed, and the Republican observers, standing in the hall outside the locked room, raised a ruckus. Their spontaneous response was a great moment of genuine American outrage, the kind of thing that led to the American Revolution, the kind of instinctive reaction against unaccountable government power on which liberty depends, the kind of thing that liberals once applauded. And of course, no one was threatened. Basically the group raised their voices and stamped their feet in protest against what was happening. But, as indicated above, since the Sixties, and greatly accelerating since 2000, liberals increasingly see everything both great and ordinary about America as evil. Thus Wolf has turned an admirable moment in recent American history into an instance of “American fascism.”

Wolf’s attack on those Republican men in shirts and ties is particularly meaningful to me because I wrote an article for NewsMax about that exciting incident at the time (oh, boy, if Auster was excited by it, that proves it was fascist), and about liberal columnist Richard Cohen’s surprising reaction to it.

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The left’s chronic obsession with an imagined American fascism is, by the way, a strong argument against the use of the term “Islamo-fascism” by so-called conservatives (who are actually right-liberals) to describe radical Muslims. At present we have the left calling Bush and the neocons fascists, and we have Bush and the neocons calling jihadist Muslims (and their leftist enablers) fascists, everyone’s calling everyone a fascist. There’s something almost … fascist about it.

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N. writes:

Let me turn to this “thug caste” for a moment. One of the functions of groups such as the SA (or “brownshirts”) under National Socialism or the blackshirts under Mussolini’s Fascism was to publicly attack and beat up speakers who criticized any aspect of the dominant political movement. Another function was to provide lots of people to march in the streets, giving the impression of a force that could not be resisted. It seems to me that there is indeed something like a “thug caste” in America; it suppresses speakers such as Jim Gilchrest by force while authority looks on with approval, it marches in the streets by the tens of thousands making political demands and gives the impression of irresistable force.

One thing about this potential “thug caste” is it is clearly not on the side of the Republican party. Perhaps Naomi Wolf is engaging in a little projection, here?

Wikipedia’s article on Naomi Wolf quotes Camille Paglia’s criticism of her as an incoherent airhead:

The release of The Beauty Myth coincided with Camille Paglia’s release of Sexual Personae, which made a defense of beauty as a natural and enduring dimension of sexuality. Paglia engaged in a spirited critique of Wolf, which included these comments in her MIT lecture:

“If you want to see what’s wrong with Ivy League education, look at The Beauty Myth, that book by Naomi Wolf. This is a woman who graduated from Yale magna cum laude, is a Rhodes scholar, and cannot write a coherent paragraph. This is a woman who cannot do historical analysis, and she is a Rhodes scholar? If you want to see the damage done to intelligent women today in the Ivy League, look at that book. It’s a scandal. Naomi Wolf is an intelligent woman. She has been ill-served by her education. But if you read Lacan, this is the result. Your brain turns to pudding! She has a case to make. She cannot make it. She’s full of paranoid fantasies about the world. Her education was completely removed from reality.”

KPA writes:

Here is a Youtube interview of Naomi Wolf by late-night comedian Stephen Colbert.

Wolf starts out mildly, going along with Colbert’s jokes, and ends up quite deranged, especially her final comments. She seems to be on the brink of losing her temper on some occasions too.

Her “analogy” looks like it was a spur of the moment idea which occurred when she was “doing research last summer.”

I thought it was interesting to see her explain herself, rather than read about it.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 22, 2007 10:43 PM | Send