ideological criminal

Last night, I spent my snowy Valentine’s evening at the Cambridge Forum’s hosting of Chris Hedges, who spoke about his latest book, American Fascists: the Christian Right and War on America (right now, the #3 bestseller on Powell’s). He spent fifteen years at the New York Times and was part of the team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize. He left the paper in 2003 shortly after the furor he caused in his Commencement address at Rockford College in Rockford, Illinois (text available here, video available on YouTube: part 1, 2, 3, 4) in which he spoke against the war in Iraq. He was booed and jeered. His mic was cut twice. Finally, he was asked to leave and escorted off campus by security. He was denounced in a Wall Street Journal editorial. He was issued a formal reprimand by the New York Times. He was also right.

The thesis of his new book, American Fascists, is that there is a strong parallel between historical fascist movements in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and ’30s and the contemporary dominionists movement—the radical Christian Right—in the US. (Hedges makes an important distinction in terms: dominionists are often mislabeled evangelicals or fundamentalists, but Hedges argues evangelicals and fundamentalists have historically advocated the withdrawal from secular society and away from the structures of political power. Dominionists seek the opposite, to highjack power and create a Christian empire).

Hedges’s talk began with a short memoir of his life growing up in rural New York state. His father was a Presbyterian minister and an early activist for gay rights, including same sex marriage. At the time Hedges was an undergraduate at Colgate, there was no gay student group. His father, who was speaking and counseling many of the gay and lesbian students, tried to convince them to start one. When he couldn’t find anyone to found the group, he turned to his son and told him he would have to do it, irrespective that he was not in fact gay. Hedges did found the club and his subsequent lunches were marked by the cashier calling him a faggot after each time he paid for his meals. He made it his undergraduate mission to seduce the cashier’s girlfriend.

Hedges would go on to earn a Masters degree from Harvard Divinity School, with the goal of being ordained and following in his father’s foot steps. (During the course of his talk, it would become clear that Hedges was endowed with the oratory skills of a preacher—as one audience member would later put it during the question and answer period: the boy can leave the seminary, but the seminary may not leave the boy). It was during his days in seminary that he would first be warned of the threat of Christian fascism; his ethics professor, aged 80, presciently said that when they, the students, were his age, they would be fighting a fascist movement from the Christian Right. At the time, it seemed unlikely to them, but this was a man who would know. He went to Germany in 1935 and ‘36 to work with the underground anti-Nazi church, The Confessing Church. He was detained by the Gestapo, who suggested he return to the US. He took the suggestion, leaving on a night train, and smuggled hours of film footage of the pro-Nazi churches he had accumulated. Placing framed photos of Hitler in his suitcases, the film went unnoticed by the border police beneath them.

It was only after he graduated that he decided to become a journalist, although he remains a believer. He spoke about his own faith, which informs his deep humility in the face of the unknown. He learned that the word of God is unknowable, and that those who speak for God, those self-appointed prophets, were dangerous. He learned that doubt and belief were not mutually exclusive. He learned that the Bible was not literally true: written by men, inconsistent and certainly fallible, it represented a history of people’s struggle with the unknown, rather the answers. Other religions, seen through this light, represent similar struggles through the unknown, equally valuable, equally correct.

Although I’m not a believer, Hedges values and ideals were close to my own. That his faith could inform his sense of doubt, his value of diversity and tolerance, his lack of righteousness, and his sense of struggle to do good with humility were refreshing, and inspiring. Having such belief, one can understand Hedges’s anger with the Christian popular movement in this country that teaches (selectively) the literal word of the Bible, that castigates homosexuals as moral deviants, that partitions the world into the saved and the damned, that teaches against science, against doubt, and against rational discourse—the struggle for understanding at the heart of Hedges’s belief. Cocksure and righteous, they seek to impose their will on the rest of us. In their view, we shall either be converted or eliminated.

American Fascists starts by quoting in full Umberto Eco’s essay “Eternal Fascism: Fourteen ways of looking at a blackshirt“, which lists fourteen characteristics of Ur-Fascism. Among them is a cult of tradition, a rejection of modernism, a despise of intellectualism and thinking, a rejection of dissent, disagreement and diversity, a culture of machismo and heroism, a contempt for the weak, and systematic use of newspeak. Hedges makes the case that the dominionist movement posses all of these characteristics.

Perhaps more important than Hedges’s observation that there are parallels between dominionist and fascist movements, is that he has a powerful analysis of where this movement comes from and how to deal with its rise. Hedges observes a culture of despair. Economic despair in the US has left large swaths of the population despondent. There is a cultural and social emptiness. Capitalism has robbed us of our spirit, bankrupted our communities, and exploited every aspect of human life. Reality has become unbearable and dominionism puts forth a constructed alternate reality that offers reprieve. Paramount to maintaining this alternative reality is an isolation from the outside world, hence the insular structures of Christian media, community, and values that undermine critical thinking.

Hedges believes the people involved in this community to be good, earnest, and hard working people, but overwhelmed by personal despair, tragedy, and loneliness. In many ways, I see Hedges as a perfect supplement to Richard Dawkins. He is everything I found lacking in Dawkins. Whereas Dawkins is somewhat of a geopolitical ignoramus, Hedges has a deep understanding and firsthand experience. Whereas Dawkins’s religious prowess is unsophisticated, Hedges’s is not. And whereas Dawkins sees the cause for belief to be mystical, irrational, and superstitious, Hedges can explain why people embrace these things, with a basis in socioeconomic factors. On the other hand, the subject of their criticism is largely the same, and both are fighting for a tolerant society that values reason, science, diversity, etc.; their goals are largely in common. Dawkins sees “moderate” religious institutions and the unfounded respect—the off-limits status of belief—as partly to blame for allowing such bigoted and irrational movements to survive, while Hedges likewise claims that government, higher education, religious and charitable institutions have wrongly allowed the dominionists room to grow. Dawkins, like Hedges, identifies many of the same characteristics that Eco lists, and both see the dire consequences of this movement coming to power, but it is only Hedges who appeals to a convincing historical analogy.

Hedges acknowledges the massive inroads into power the dominionist movement have made, as seen by the spread of homo- and xenophobic legislation, the cowing of political heavy hitters such as John McCain who used to lambaste the intolerance of the Christian Right, and the “[f]orty-five senators and 186 members of the House of Representatives [who have] earned approval ratings of 80 to 100 percent from the three most influential Christian Right advocacy groups: the Christian Coalition, Eagle Forum, and Family Resource Council.” However, he still understands that as of yet the Dominionist movement is largely a marginal one. The worry, Hedges contends, is that the movement is well poised to be a revolutionary political force in the event of a large-scale terrorist attack, a series of ecological disasters, or an economic meltdown. Faced with crisis, the country may turn to the protection and comfort of the alternative reality offered by the dominionists and we will witness the destruction of American democracy in its wake. The stuff of V for Vendetta would no longer be an abstraction.

The movement has already secured a vanguard military body in Blackwater USA—the mercenary firm founded by dominionist millionaire Erik Prince—which employs some 20,000 mercenaries. (Incidentally, Jeremy Scahill, formerly of Democracy Now!, has a new book on the firm, due out soon: Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. He recently spoke on the topic in an interview on DN!). Their handiwork can be seen in Iraq, Afghanistan, and New Orleans, the latter of which Hedges believes to offer a grim glimpse of a future under the boot of dominionism, with the oppression usually reserved for others visited upon ourselves. Hedges also observes that despite the movements isolation from, and condemnation of, almost every US institution, there are two exceptions to this rule: the police and the armed forces. They actively recruit their followers to join the state troopers and local police and to enlist in the military, they hold supportive rallies and are constantly lavishing praise upon both, and they have penetrated the chaplaincy of the armed forces to an alarming degree (claiming a huge percentage of the chaplain positions—50 to 70 percent if I recall correctly).

The paradox of tolerance, as Hedges sees it, has allowed the intolerant to amass more power than can safely be ignored. Media, universities, intellectuals, churches, and the government must stand up and oppose this movement. Beyond an intellectual confrontation, a legal and legislative battle must be waged by enacting hate crime laws as has been done in Canada. Hedges noted that on several occassions at the dominionist rallies he attended, the speaker would make a remark to the effect of eradicating gays, or immigrants, or some other ‘degenerate’ segment of the population, and then sneer and laugh and remark ‘we could never say these things in Canada, they’d throw us in jail’, which Hedges takes as evidence that they [Canadians] may be sane. I’m not so sure. Incendiary speech is not protected under the First Amendment in this country, although the burden of proof (that of ‘intent’) is extremely difficult to meet, but I would be very skeptical of any speech law reform. With any law, as with war, it is difficult to judge the consequences from the outset. I am so skeptical that reasonable reforms could be enacted that could not be made through interpretation to apply to legitimate speech. Hedges charges the movement with sedition and supposes this a legitimate ground for silencing the movement, but sedition should be protected in my opinion. What could be charged against the dominionists that could not, perhaps through contortion and misrepresentation, be charged against the Black Panthers or Malcolm X, for example? There is no need, in my mind to meddle with these things. Our position can overcome through the engagement of rationality alone, not with the movement itself, which is clearly irrational, but with policy makers, with institutions that can exert influence, and with the populace. The KKK was not defeated through hate speech legislation, but a raising of the collective conscientiousness. The same will suffice here.

But more importantly, as Hedges offers in his analysis, the surest way of defeating this movement is to fold back into the mainstream these large swaths of discontented people. A new New Deal is needed. Economic prosperity, jobs, healthcare, and security (in the real sense of the word) are needed. If we can address the very real causes of despair, these utopian movements will simply vanish. Historically, the US industrialists of the ’20s and ’30s saw the corporatism of Mussolini’s fascism as an attractive way to fight Roosevelt’s New Deal. Contemporary corporatism, which is the reluctant midwife of the dominionist movement, likewise needs to be confronted and challenged. As Hedges points out, much of this country looks like the third world and failing to address the causes of despair is simply, as he says, self immolation. The lessons of American Fascists are, as an audience member said, like a fire alarm in the night.