Does Conservatism Always Lead to Fascism?

From the slaveholding South to Jim Crow, Reagan’s billionaire revolution, and Trump’s police state, the same dangerous pattern keeps repeating. Is fascism conservatism’s ultimate destination?

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

What happens when “conservatives” would rather destroy their democracy than surrender power? History shows us how that road leads straight to fascism, and Trump is taking America down it.

When I was a kid I once asked my dad, who called himself an Eisenhower conservative, what “conservative” meant. He told me it wasn’t that different from liberalism but instead of favoring drastic or radical change in a society believed that such change should come gradually as the result of careful thought, debate, and incremental processes to minimize disruption to society. He quoted William F. Buckley saying, “A Conservative is a fellow who is standing athwart history yelling ‘Stop!’”

My dad was a naive idealist who missed entirely the direction his “conservative” movement was heading. Conservatism has always, throughout history and in every country where it’s seized a strong foothold, been the precursor to the destruction of social cohesion (look at “conservative” Macron’s France after 45 years of neoliberalism) and eventually violent fascism.

Today’s American conservative movement began at our nation’s founding with the people who opposed our Revolutionary War, grew through the Old South as the plantation owners rose up and turned that region into a brutal oligarchy and declared war on our democracy, reappeared as Jim Crow and the 1940s’ America First movement, popped up again with Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn, and is now full-blown with MAGA Trumpism and its billionaire backers.

It thrives on fear and resentment while it embraces violence, authoritarianism, and great wealth, the basic hallmarks of fascism.

Consider how when Abdul El-Sayed was challenged by a paid heckler he turned it into a thoughtful discussion, while in two of Trump’s rallies in the past week he’s encouraged his mob as they beat senseless people who dared challenge him or call for the release of the Epstein files.

Or how Trump’s masked, armed ICE thugs have beaten, imprisoned, and even murdered American citizens with impunity while using terror tactics against dark-skinned non-citizens.

In a 1957 editorial titled Why the South Must Prevail, Buckley laid out explicitly what the foundation of his then-reawakening conservative movement must be.

“Again, let us speak frankly,” Buckley wrote: “The South does not want to deprive the Negro of a vote for the sake of depriving him of the vote. … In some parts of the South, the White community merely intends to prevail — that is all. It means to prevail on any issue on which there is corporate disagreement between Negro and White. The White community will take whatever measures are necessary to make certain that it has its way.”

He asked, rhetorically, if white people in the South are “entitled” to “prevail” over nonwhites even in rural areas of the country or large cities with majority Black populations.

“The sobering answer,” Buckley, the acknowledged godfather of today’s conservative movement, wrote, “is Yes — the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.”

Arguably, following up in April of 2021 the National Review published an article headlined: Why Not Fewer Voters? justifying Republican voter suppression.

While conservativism in all its incarnations around the world has always embraced racism (look at what Modi is doing now in India, for example), it typically ends with iron-fisted fascism.

And it’s here, now, in America.

The Free Press (the original one, not Bari Weiss’ knock-off) just published a report titled Enemies of the State that analyses Trump’s National Security Presidential Memo 7 (NSPM-7).

It orders the FBI, DHS, Treasury, and the IRS to aim every counterterrorism, tax, and surveillance tool they have at a target defined by nothing more than ideology, which the memo spells out as “anti-Americanism, anti-Christianity, and anti-capitalism.” Yes, the thought police are now here.

Then-AG Bondi’s follow-up memos told federal prosecutors to go after protestors with the highest provable charges, build list of “Antifa-aligned entities,” open a tip line with cash rewards (Trump rolled this out last week under the rubric of “fraud”), and use terrorism as the excuse for the most severe punishments possible.

Its first real test was a July 4th noisy demonstration outside the Prairieland ICE facility in Texas that did about $4,400 in property damage. One of the protestors, Benjamin Song, shot and wounded a police officer he claimed was aiming at an unarmed protestor, and he got 100 years in prison for his offense. Protestor Maricela Rueda got a 70 year sentence for being there and “conspiring” with Song, five others got 50 years in federal prison each, and Rueda’s husband — who wasn’t even at the protest — got a 30 year sentence for helping hide a box of zines.

But the report’s real warning is what’s coming up next. The FBI now runs a multi-agency NSPM-7 Joint Mission Center drawing on staffers from roughly ten federal agencies looking for people whose opinions may be “anti-American.” The DOJ indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center in April, and in August arrested Heidi Beirich, the woman who spent two decades tracking the Klan and neo-Nazis for them.

Treasury Secretary Bessent is reportedly drafting a plan to strip the tax exemptions of Open Society, SPLC and CAIR, and Homeland Security has investigated more than 150 nonprofits that register voters, claiming they’re nailing these groups to protect “election integrity.” As the authors, Shilpa Jindia and Nora Benavidez, put it plainly:

“It treats speaking out, protesting and civic-engagement activities as ‘evidence of terrorism.’”

— Richard Nixon was the first Republican in the modern era to openly dance with the fascists, welcoming southern white supremacist Democrats into the GOP after LBJ signed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts. His right-hand man John Ehrlichman laid it out plainly, describing the explicitly fascist intent behind Nixon’s so-called War On Drugs.

— Reagan brought in the morbidly rich and Heritage and laid the foundation for the explosion of rightwing billionaires and their acquisition of our media and social media. He sent surplus military equipment to our police departments, turning them into something that more resembles an occupying army than a “serve and protect” group that Andy Griffiths would recognize.

The reality is they’re not “conserving” anything. They’re instead echoing the thousands of years of modern history of kings and kingdoms where the ruler had absolute, life-or-death power over a nation’s subjects, and citizenship and freedom were both dependent on his whim.

Hierarchy, patriarchy, and a few hundred billionaire families drive today’s Republican effort to defeat our Founders’ liberal democracy and replace it with a Russia-style authoritarian oligarchy and fascism.

There’s no moral core to this so-called “patriotic” movement; just look at Ramaswamy’s despicable attacks on Dr. Amy Acton, Trump saying that “Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine; they haven’t been doing much” as the missiles murder civilians, and the GOP’s slanders questioning both Talarico’s sexuality and El-Sayed’s loyalty to America.

It’s all about power and the money associated with it. Corruption is fine, so long as you don’t get caught. We now have more concentration camps in America than Hitler did at the end of his first year, and our wealth disparities are greater than any time in American history.

For hundreds of thousands of years, as I document in The Hidden History of American Democracy, tribal people around the world mostly lived in egalitarian societies (there were exceptions, of course) where the “chief” was actually the servant of the tribe rather than its dictator.

They were the archetype and model for the Founders of our republic and the Framers of our Constitution, a worldview and governing philosophy today being openly challenged by rightwing billionaires from the Trump family on down.

The damage they’ve done to our republic and working class people — from Reagan’s Mandate for Leadership to Trump’s Project 2025 and alliances with Putin — is extraordinary. It’ll take a generation to undo, if America is to recover and become Lincoln’s “more perfect union.”

But there’s considerable reason for hope; change is in the wind worldwide.

The people of Hungary said “no” to fascism in April and turned out Putin’s puppet and Trump’s friend Orbán. The people of Serbia yesterday said “no” to fascism and turned out Putin’s toady and Trump’s friend Vučić. As did Brazilians when they rejected Trump/Putin friend Flavio Bolsonaro.

Will we also say “no” to fascism and turn out the Republican lickspittles who revel in sucking up to Putin’s toady Trump?

That effort begins with us, finally coming down to this week and early next, showing up to vote and continuing to speak out.

Tag, we’re it!

Louise’s Daily Song: “Does Conservatism Always Lead to Fascism?”

Comments on The Saturday Report:
Does Ramaswamy’s Depraved New Ad Mark a New Low in the GOP’s Moral Collapse?

The present Administration is a national disgrace and tragedy. Trump is an ignorant and bloviating mendacious grifter lacking morals and any decency enabled by a GOP that is greedy and sycophantic and has little or no concern for their constituents, the truth, the Constitution and the values of the Gospels in the Bible they so blithely profess to believe.
~ Jacobs-Medway Roberta

Another, week of nuts stuff Thom! We, will get through this! Or, will we? Stay tuned.
~ Jackie

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