4-09-05, 9:28 am

Dashiell Hammett, novelist, creator in fiction of the American private detective, and CPUSA activist, had his most famous fictional detective, Sam Spade, say about a tough talking thug in The Maltese Falcon, 'the cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter.' I thought of Hammett, who went to prison for refusing to hand over a list of names to the witch-hunters in the 1950s and was bankrupted for political reasons by the IRS, when I read of Tom DeLay’s threats against 'activist judges' and 'liberal media' who have dared to expose corrupt practices that in most society would, assuming he was found guilty of them, lead him straight to the penitentiary. I also thought of mass media’s best known 'Marxist,' the great Groucho, in the classic film, Duck Soup. When Groucho is discovered hiding in the closet of sexpot Thelma Todd’s bedroom by her outraged husband, he arrogantly says, 'Who are you going to believe? Me or your own eyes?'

First of all, Tom DeLay, although the victims of his political savagery are his fellow Americans, is really part of our global problem. When knowledgeable Europeans and Asians, those who know the history of fascism through the world, look at politicians like Tom DeLay, former Senator Jesse Helms, and many other prominent right-wing Republicans, they see American versions of Jean Marie Le Pen in France, Georg Haider in Austria, the National Democrats in Germany, the leaders of political parties that everyone pretty much calls neo-Fascist. What right-wing politicians in the US often sneer at as 'political correctness' has been established in anti-racist defamation laws in Germany and other countries which have had direct experience with either fascist regimes or occupation.

The European neo-fascist parties and leaders are clearly differentiated and separated from the principle conservative parties in virtually all European countries. Outside of Italy, the European conservative party leaders really see them as hateful competitors and have little to do with them. In Italy, which has a particularly obnoxious right-wing government led by the media mogul Silvio Berlusconi (who controls virtually all of Italian television, both private and public) the leader of the 'former fascist' National Alliance party, Giancarlo Fini, is foreign minister, and that, the Berlusconi government in general and Fini in particularly, is as close as one gets to what we have in the US.

The facts concerning Tom DeLay’s activities, as gleaned from press reports and interviews, are reminiscent of the actions of political bullies, adventurers, and self-aggrandizing personalities that one finds in milder forms in capitalist politics generally, but in this form in far right and Fascist politics specifically. $500,000 in alleged payouts to his wife and daughter from his political action committee since 2001. Large sums of money raised for his political and, perhaps, personal use from powerful corporate interests and wealthy people in exchange for unspecified services rendered. A gerrymandering scheme for Texas congressional seats that caused Texas Democrats to flee the state and would even make Eldbridge Gerry, the Federalist politician of two centuries ago from whom the term 'gerrymander' comes, blush. A reputation for using both patronage and intimidation to keep his fellow Republicans in line and on-line in rubber-stamping the ultra-right’s political agenda. And the sneering, snarling attitude that one associates with ultra-right and fascist politics throughout the world--the name-calling, defamation, constant threats to destroy all opponents, constant projection unto one’s political enemies one’s basest actions and motives.

In the United States, DeLay’s allies and supporters call him a 'fixture' of the 'conservative movement' attacked by its hated 'liberal enemies.' But, what is a conservative in America and the world? First of all, conservatives everywhere are suspicious of movements and don’t claim to have one. Conservatives in most places seek to literally 'conserve' existing institutions to prevent radical change or 'liberalization.' Conservatives everywhere support 'meritorious elites' technical, judicial, and scientific 'experts,' in determining policy, and see those with property and wealth as having a far greater stake in the society and far more ability to determine policy than the lower classes, those with little or no property. Conservatives in most places identify with religion, nation, and family, as institutions to maintain social cohesion in order to sustain the existing social order, which is constantly threatened from below by the lower classes, frustrated by their failures and unable to appreciate that those who are successful are wiser and better than they are. Conservatives in most countries are wary of religious fanatics and usually willing to accept religious minorities, if those minorities keep their subordinate 'place' in the larger social order.

Conservatives in most places believe that the means, the institutions, the laws, the rituals, are at least as important as the ends, and the latter can never justify the former. In essence, conservatives support a largely static, slowly changing society, sustaining core institutions which protect core values and accepting modest changes within those institutions in order to sustain core values.

Reactionaries and fascists, particularly fascists, believe in some glorious past, Mussolini’s Roman Empire, Hitler’s First and Second German Empires, or the ultra right’s version: pre-Fair Labor Standards Act, Brown v. Board of Education, Roe v. Wade, White Protestant, Male Ruggedly Individualist and Pious Christian small town America, which has been betrayed by politicians of the left, subversive minorities, and an immoral modern culture. All of these are 'enemies from within' who must be driven from power and exorcised from the society.

Slogans like 'Who has betrayed us, the Social Democrats,' 'The Jews are our Misfortune,' 'Think with your Blood,' 'One Nation, One Race, One People,' are the slogans of fascist movements. 'America is a White Man’s country,' 'Get the US out of the UN and the UN out of the US,' God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve,' are some of the US ultra right equivalents.

Tom Delay and his ilk are at war with virtually all of pre Ronald Reagan twentieth century America. Whether it is packing the congress or the federal judiciary, they not only see the end justifying the means but make no distinction between ends and means. Rather like such fascist leaders as Hitler and Mussolini, they preach doctrines of personal austerity and self-sacrifice for the country and live dissolute or at least amoral lives themselves.

In Nazi political theory, the so-called 'Fuhrer principle,' that the people were responsible to the leader who in turn was not responsible to them, but only to some higher power, his superior Will, God, or assorted Gods was written down into the laws of the Nazi state. While Tom DeLay and the right-wing Republicans have no de jure 'Fuhrer Principle' written down yet, they act on their own de facto Fuhrer Principle, exempting both themselves and their leading corporate backers from the traditional moral, ethical, and legal restraints on conduct in civil society associated as much with conservatives as with liberals and radicals. When they are caught, they threaten and impugn the motives of those who catch them and, in the case of DeLay, proclaim that they march with God against the 'activist judges' and 'liberal media' of their unholy enemies.

No matter that Republican administrations have controlled the presidency for 25 of the last 37 years and the number of right-wing oriented judicial appointments has been far, far greater than the liberal and progressive appointments (Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, by the way, the only Democrats who have reached the White House since 1969, didn’t exactly follow Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson in their judicial appointments).

No matter regulatory agencies, social agencies, and laws protecting working people have been undermined as real wages have stagnated and declined for most of the last thirty years. No matter that the real separation of Church and State in the US has been undermined over the last generation by right-wing Republican politicians and that the effective separation of religion from politics in the US is weaker today, not stronger, than in most other developed countries, including the United Kingdom, which has a state church.

Ultra-rightists and open Fascists are in effect cheap political crooks whose gaudy patter is aimed at covering up their corruption, crimes, and drive to establish dictatorial political power. Sing 'God Bless America' (or 'Deutchsland Uber Alles,' or whatever) hate Communists, Socialists, liberals, Jews, Muslims, or whomever is convenient in your political market, and 'think with your blood,' a Mussolini slogan that translates as think with your emotions and ethnicity, not with your head. That way you can believe Tom DeLay when he says that the ' liberal media' are out to get him and 'activist judges' are at war with America. You can believe that the occupation of Iraq is about the defense of Freedom and Democracy, and the campaign to privatize Social Security is essentially a campaign to save it. You can just believe, in God, in America, in Japanese Militarism’s Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, in any abstractions without having to think about anything else and nod your head in agreement when the right-wing politicians ask you Groucho’s question: 'Who are you going to believe? Me or your own eyes?'



--Norman Markowitz is a contributing editor of Political Affairs.